Page 90 of Yours on the Canvas

“Please,” I whisper, the word slipping out before I can stop it. “Please, don’t…”

“Shut your mouth,” my dad barks.

He steps around the side of the bed, reaching down to grab the hem of my sweat-soaked MMA shorts. With a violent yank, he rips them down, exposing my battered, bruised skin to the cold air of the cellar. The humiliation hits me like a physical blow, hot and blinding, burning behind my eyes.

Ray steps in to hold my knees down, pressing his heavy forearm across my shins so I can’t thrash.

My father raises the leather strap high.

The first strike descends with a vicious, whistling crack that tears through the air. Fire erupts across my stomach and thighs, a blinding white-hot agony that makes my back arch violently against the mattress, straining the zip-ties until they bite into the bone of my wrists.

A ragged scream rips from my throat, raw and broken.

“You don’t scream in this house,” my dad warns, his arm coming down again in a merciless arc. Crack.

The second blow lands directly over the welt of the first, setting my skin ablaze. Tears overflow, hot and fast, streaming down my cheeks and pooling in my ears as the blows rain down without rhythm, without mercy. Over and over, they beat me, punishing me not for losing, but for surviving, for fighting back, for daring to hold onto a shred of myself out there in the light.

Every strike of the leather is a calculated blow designed to shatter what is left of my spirit, to drive every memory of Silas, every touch of warmth, every trace of the sky completely out of my body.

By the time they finally stop, my breathing is shallow, ragged, and wheezing. My entire lower body is on fire, numb and throbbing with a dull, sickening ache.

“Think about that next time you think you can win on your own,” my dad spits, dropping the bloodied leather strap onto the floor beside the cot.

They turn their backs, walking out of the cellar and slamming the heavy wooden door shut. The deadbolt slides into place, sealing me back in the dark.

My hands hang from the headboard, my body now shivering uncontrollably, broken down to raw meat and bone. The darkness creeps in from the edges of my vision, heavy and suffocating. As my consciousness begins to fracture and slip away into the black, I close my eyes against the pain, holding onto the only thing they can never reach.

Sol… please find me, Sol.

24

Silas

The operations room smells like cold coffee, stale air, and dead ends.

Three months of silence has turned the air heavy, the very atmosphere in the Op’s room is suffocating me, every screen flickering with no new leads, like a constant running joke that keeps telling me that I’ve lost my dove.

I stand in front of my laptop, my hands flat against the cold wooden edge of the table, and I stare at the map of Seattle that has now become my waking nightmare.

Ninety days of trying to trace Jack.

Ninety days of pulling bank records that lead to empty shell companies, and scouring every dark web forum for a single whisper of Dale and Ray. They’re ghosts. They have scrubbed every trace of themselves, gone completely off the grid, leaving me with nothing but phantom leads and dead links that taunt my incompetence, and keep me away from my boy.

CJ, Deck, Mack, and Callan rotate shifts sitting with me while they work, their presence a silent, heavy anchor as I tear through the data. I know what they’re thinking,I see it in the way they look at the wall of photos, in the way they trade glances when they think I’m too buried in my laptop to notice.

They’re starting to believe the worst.

It’s not just the silence from the monitors; it’s the pressure from the outside as well. Earlier today, CJ pulled me aside, his voice low and weary. He needs to pull staff from my case. PalMerc has clients, contracts, obligations that don’t stop just because my world has ended.

Hell, Mack and Callan have been running my own clients for months just so I could stay chained to this desk, but the well is running dry. I’d argued with him, snarled that we needed every single person looking, that we couldn’t afford to lose a single pair of eyes, but I knew I was talking to a wall. I knew he was right.

And that only made me hate him, and myself, more.

I’ve watched hundreds of hours of illegal matches, my eyes burning and bloodshot, scanning faces in the crowds and fighters in the dimly lit rings across the Pacific Northwest. I’m looking for him. I’m looking for the man who owns every corner of my soul, the only thing that makes the world coherent.

But the fighters are strangers, the venues change weekly, and none of them hold my dove.

My body feels hollow, wired on black coffee, protein shakes and pure, unadulterated desperation.